My Name is Paul H Cosentino. I started this Blog in 2011 because of what I believe to be wrongdoings in town government. This Blog is to keep the citizens of Templeton informed. It is also for the citizens of Templeton to post their comments and concerns.

Paul working for you.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Julia Ward Howe’s 1870 Anti-War Mother’s Day Proclamation, A Day of Peace

An Anti-War Manifesto Lamenting the Dead, Dying and Soul-Sickened Soldiers Returning from the Killing Fields

147
years ago, the disastrous human and economic consequences of the
American Civil War were becoming increasingly apparent, especially to
certain thoughtful wise women who had seen their testosterone-laden
loved ones eagerly march off to that “inglorious” war 5 years earlier.
Those men and women, as is still the case today, had no idea of the
psychological and spiritual devastation that comes from killing fellow
humans until it was too late. But the well-hidden truth hit them when
they saw their loved ones come home, changed forever. Some came home
dead, some were just physically wounded but all were spiritually
deadened.

That
“patriotic” war basically ended in mutual exhaustion in 1865. The
Northern foot-soldiers (who were numerically stronger) did not feel
gleeful over the hollow victory” – just relief. Many Civil War-era
women, including Howe, had actually willingly participated in the
flag-waving fervor that war–mongers and war-profiteers can easily
manufacture. Pro-war propaganda has always been directed at poor and
working class men who must be duped into doing the soul-damning dirty
work of killing and being killed.

Julia Ward Howe,
author of the Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870, was a life-long
abolitionist and therefore, early on, she was a supporter of the Union
Army’s anti-slavery rationale for going to war to prevent the
pro-slavery politicians and industrialists in the Confederate South from
seceding from the union over the slavery issue.

Howe
was a compassionate and well-educated middle child of an upper class
family. She was also a poet who, in the early days of the Civil War, had
written “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” using many biblically-based
lyrics. Howe had intended her song to be sung as an abolitionist song;
however, because of some of the militant-sounding lyrics and the
eminently marchable tune, it was rapidly adopted by Union Army
propagandists as its most inspiring war song, a reality that Howe likely
regretted when the mass slaughter of the world’s first “total war”
became clear to her.

Howe
wrote the “Battle Hymn” in one sitting (in the early hours of November
18, 1861), but she soon became a pacifist and an antiwar activist. At
the time she wrote the song, the Civil War was just starting and had not
yet degenerated into the wholesale slaughter that was made possible by
the technological advances in weaponry (mainly artillery and rifled
muskets that were more accurate) that would make cavalry charges, the
bayonet and the sword obsolete.

Back then the Press Didn’t Censor out ALL the Horrors of War

Howe’s
evolution from cheerleader for war to anti-war activism came about
after she witnessed the mutual mass slaughter of the War Between the
States (1861 – 1865). By the time she proposed a national day of
mourning for the victims of all wars, she had also become aware of the
carnage that was occurring overseas in the Franco-Prussian War, which
had started in July of 1870.

That
war, won by Germany, was brief, but close to 100,000 soldiers were
killed in action and another 100,000 were severely wounded. As is
tragically normal for warrior nations of all historical eras, nobody
thought to count up the psychological and spiritual casualties or either
soldiers or civilians. But Howe understood. Her awareness of the
realities of war was possible because war correspondents were allowed to
write about the barbaric nature of modern war, which horrified
sensitive humans like Howe.

It
hadn’t taken too long for peace-loving, justice-oriented and
compassionate observers to recognize that war was indeed, the equivalent
of hell on earth. Howe understood what Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman had meant when he uttered his famous statement about the satanic nature of war. Sherman’s statement indicted his era’s “Chicken Hawks*”:

“I confess without
shame that I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is
only those who have never heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded
who cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is
Hell.”

The
list of Chicken Hawk elites also includes many right-wing journalists
and reporters who particularly love to beat the war drum, but who also
avoided serving in the military themselves, including Bill O’Reilly,
Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Bill
Kristol, Rush Limbaugh, etc, etc.

Women
throughout history have witnessed their sons and husbands returning
home broken in body, mind and spirit. Those psychologically traumatized
veterans, no matter on what side of the battle line they fought, and
whether they claimed some sort of hollow victory or not, were all
equally defeated when the war ended. And most of them never regarded
themselves as heroes until somebody else insisted on the designation.
Their bodies and brains had been forever changed and they knew it. And
in their hearts they knew that war was not glorious.

Soldiers’ Heart: the Civil War-era’s PTSD

The
unexpected development for many of the mothers of the returning Civil
War soldiers was the fact that, while many of the veterans came home
showing no physical scars, most of them were still disabled mentally,
and many of them actually got progressively worse after coming home. In
cases of combat-induced trauma the healing effect of time doesn’t work
like it can work in less serious types of trauma.

Military
veterans with combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) all
too commonly have trouble functioning in society after the war. Many
become severely depressed and/or anxious and suffer disabling daytime
flashbacks of the original trauma (called nightmares when they occur in
their sleep, but which are commonly misdiagnosed by psychiatrists as
hallucinations – thus accounting for the falsely high incidence of
“schizophrenia” among Vietnam vets). May military vets have serious
insomnia (and thus sleep deprivation), serious concentration problems
and are frequently develop drug addictions (to both illicit drugs and
prescription drugs). Many combat-induced PTSD victims become suicidal,
homicidal and/or turn to a life of crime (all these behaviors are
seriously potentiated by the use of brain-altering addictive drugs or
during the process of withdrawing from them).

It
is a fact that some of the most infamous post-Civil War outlaws, train
robbers, bank robbers and serial killers of the late 1800s got their
start as Civil War soldiers (the members of the James and Younger gangs
are good examples).

America
has never known what to do with the large numbers of traumatized
veterans that come home after any of their wars, and in the Civil War,
the first “veterans homes” were constructed specifically for the care of
invalided ex-soldiers who were “made crazy” by the war. Without the
nation’s help, these victims would have otherwise been homeless,
despairing, jobless, helpless and likely to starve to death.

Many
of these unfortunate veterans were diagnosed as having “Soldiers’
Heart”, also known in the Civil War era as “Nostalgia”, a commonly
incurable malady, that, after World War I came to be known as “shell
shock”. After World War II the disorder was known as “combat fatigue”,
and after the Vietnam War it was known as “post-traumatic stress
disorder”.

Howe’s Call to Action for Mothers

Julia
Ward Howe was a humanist who cared about suffering people. She was also
a feminist, a social justice activist and a suffragette, and it was
because of her anti-war commitment that she wrote the famous “Mother’s
Day Proclamation” five years after the end of the Civil War, which
resulted in a total of 600,000 dead American soldiers, with no accurate
count of the probably much larger number of those soldiers who were
wounded, missing in action or committed suicide after the war was over.

The
Mother’s Day Proclamation was partly a lament for the useless deaths
and partly a call to stop future wars. The call to action was not
directed at men, most of whom would have refused to admit, because of
their masculine pride, that their dead buddies had died in vain. Rather,
the call was directed at women, who were more thoughtful, humane and
compassionate than the more violence-prone male members of the species.

The Intent of Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation has Been Conveniently Forgotten

Sadly,
Howe’s original call for mothers to protest against war on a regular
basis has been struck from the consciousness of our capitalist,
corporate-controlled media, militarized and war-profiteering society.
Howe’s call has been watered-down to a sentimental shadow of its
original intent. And the war-weary world and its innocent children are
increasingly suffering because of it.

Mother’s Day in America was officially established in 1914 (May 9) as an annual holiday, but no mention was made by President Wilson that Howe wanted the day dedicated as a day of peace. Wilson instead said it was to commemorate America’s mothers.

And
so Mother’s Day eventually became commercialized into just another
profit-making holiday for corporations, with no regard for its original
intent (pro-peace/anti-war). So now, just like most American holidays
(especially including the originally religious ones like Easter and
Christmas), Mother’s Day has been commercially exploited. What was
originally a call to mobilize outraged mothers to keep their duped sons
and husbands from going off half-cocked to kill and die for some
corporate war profiteer or other, has become just another opportunity
for commercial enterprises to enhance their bottom lines. Mention of its
original purpose is a rarity.

One
wonders what “irrelevant agencies” Howe was talking about in line two
of her Proclamation below. Surely she meant the predecessors of
America’s modern-day militarists, politicians, bankers, media moguls,
sociopathic corporatists and various bureaucratic agencies that have
been royally messing things up all over the world.

Think
of all the nations that America’s military has bombed, invaded, and
occupied with many of them then being economically colonized by our
predatory financial corporations. Think of all the countries around the
world that our CIA has destabilized and helped to overthrow. Think of
all the foreign national elections that our American Deep State has
covertly influenced so that they will conform to our “national
interests” (meaning, of course, mainly American “business interests”).

Note
in Howe’s manifesto below how strongly she felt about wives and mothers
never again having to be put in the position of applauding their
soldier-husbands or soldier-sons when they came home from war “reeking
of carnage”. Howe clearly felt that mothers should never again let
war-making, war-profiteering institutions make killers out of their sons
who they had raised to be ethical, humane citizens with a love for
humankind. The prevention of such “reeking of carnage” is so much
simpler than the never-ending attempts to somehow reverse the often
untreatable consequences of the horrors of combat war. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and all that.

Let
the people of good will begin again to promote the peacemaking vision
of Julia Ward Howe and her female cohorts a century and a half ago.
Given America’s current chaotic time of perpetual war, there is no time
to lose. A good place to begin would be this Mother’s Day, May 13, 2017,
perhaps followed up by a boycott of the upcoming, highly militarized,
war-promoting Duluth Air Show (featuring the US Navy Blue Angels, and
various war planes including an F-35, an F-16 and Canadian Air Force
fighter jet ) partially designed to interest impressionable young boys
into someday joining the military but with no information about the
above-mentioned consequences of participating in war.

Dr. Kohls is a retired physician from the Duluth, MN, USA who writes about issues of war, peace and mental health.

* * *

Julia Ward Howe’s 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation

“Arise then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or tears!

“Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies.

“Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience.

“We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

“From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, ‘Disarm, disarm’

“The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor does violence indicate possession.

“As
men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war,
let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest
day of counsel.

“Let
them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them
solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great
human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the
sacred impress, not of Caesar but of God.

“In the name of womanhood and of
humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit
of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most
convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to
promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable
settlement of international questions and the great and general
interests of peace.”